Bob Carr: I make no apologies

A decade ago former Whitlam government minister and ALP president Barry Cohen expressed his dismay at what he called ''rampant anti-Semitism in the Labor Party'' to a ''Labor legend''.

''I expected a vigorous denial,'' Cohen told The Age back in 2004. ''Instead, his response confirmed my worst fear: 'I know,' he said.''

On Thursday, sitting at home on the NSW Central Coast, one of Australia's prominent Jewish politicians decided it was time to again speak his mind. What rankled Cohen were the words of a man he once considered a friend in the world of Labor politics, former NSW premier Bob Carr.

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In his new book, Diary of a Foreign Minister, Carr claims Melbourne's pro-Israel lobby held an ''extraordinary'' level of influence over prime minister Julia Gillard and details his fights with the self-described pro-Israel ''falafel faction'' within Labor caucus, which includes Jewish MPs Michael Danby and Mark Dreyfus.

Carr even claims the Melbourne-based Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council had a direct line into the prime minister's office.

''I have seen what Bob Carr has written about the power of the pro-Israel lobby,'' Mr Cohen said. ''You want to know what I think of Bob's comments? Here's what I think. I think it's bullshit.''

''I have worked with [Gough] Whitlam and [Bob] Hawke and been part of politics for 21 years. The thought that a lobby group in Melbourne could pick up the phone and tell the prime minister what to do is laughable.''

Carr's book has shone a spotlight on a simmering divide within the ALP, and an issue that will prove a difficult test for leader Bill Shorten.

Historically, the ties between the Victorian branch of the ALP and Melbourne's Jewish community have been strong. Bob Hawke was a vocal advocate of Israel throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Paul Keating saw no reason to change the party's stance on Middle East policy when prime minister, and subsequent Victorian-based ALP leaders, including Simon Crean, Julia Gillard and now Bill Shorten, have been staunchly pro-Israel.

''It's a historic thing,'' says Cohen. ''The Jews who fled to Australia in the 1930s and the 1940s were predominantly of the left. Some were socialists or even communists back in Germany and Austria. Of course they would be supporters of Labor in Australia. In Melbourne, those ties with the ALP seem to have remained, but in Sydney everything has changed.''

What changed, according to some senior figures in the ALP, is the composition of party membership in NSW. ''What you had, back in the late 1990s, was some serious branch stacking by the NSW Right,'' one senior Labor figure told Fairfax Media. ''If you look at Sydney's inner-west, several hundred Lebanese Muslims were signed up as party members in one branch in just one month. I think it was 1996 or 1997.''

In 2002, Liberal MP Christopher Pyne picked up on ALP branch stacking in a speech to Parliament.

''In 2000, the report into the Labor Party by former premier Barry Unsworth found that 90 per cent of the Labor members in the federal seat of Fowler had been signed up by branch stackers exploiting ethnic hostilities,'' Mr Pyne said.

''While the ALP usually recruits between 200 and 300 people across the state each month, more than 2100 were signed up in December 1996. Around 300 [were] Lebanese-Australians.''

With new membership came different views, in particular on Middle East policy.

''One thing you understand,'' said one senior Liberal figure, ''is that it does not take very long for the stackees to become the stackers.

''I think that's what we have seen in Labor over the past 15 years. It is a growing divide between the traditional support base of Labor in Melbourne and Labor in Sydney.''

And so it was. During his 18 months as Australia's foreign minister, Mr Carr orchestrated a significant shift in the Australian government's Middle East policy.

He succeeded in forcing Ms Gillard to abandon her determination to oppose Palestine's attempts to gain observer status at the UN.

''There is already a joke getting about,'' one prominent member of Melbourne's Jewish community said. ''It's that the people who should be really offended by Bob Carr are Sydney's Jews. Apparently we have more power over the prime minister than them.''